VoIP and Broadband Report has this to say about Vonage and Primus:
Retail VoIP services hit by influencers’ bad word-of-mouth
Mass-market independent VoIP services such as Vonage and Primus’ Lingo offering have been effected
by poor reviews from major web-based influencers. William van Hefner, a telecom writer who’s
Discount Long Distance Digest is read by many US telecom agents, wrote in a recent editorial: “As
a Vonage customer myself, I have to concede that the more time goes on, the more unreliable the
company’s service seems to be”.“Complete lack of dialtone and distorted calls now seem to be a regular occurrence, even when connected to a full T1.
I would say Vonage and Primus need to clean up their act based on this and other news accounts of late.
What does “complete lack of dialtone” mean? I thought the dialtone is provided by the ATA. So the problem must be local to the ATA and not the service provider. Since it is written by a “major web-based influencer(s)”, probably my understanding is wrong.
Are these authors specifically talking about Primus and Vonage, or are they lumping all VoIP providers under the same umbrella. I know Vonage has had many outages recently, and I am not sure whether it’s caused by Vonage’s lousy infrastructure and the fact that they have had to “piece” together all the software etc from different vendors and software providers, or their software needs some serious upgrading and cannot handle the volume that they are trafficing.
Primus, on the other hand, I have no idea what their deal is.
as a Packet8 reseller , I have PERFECT service and 100% clear VOIP calls…….when will VONAGE figure out you have to ride Level3 for “”QUALITY OF SERVICE”” and NOT global crossing which does NOT guarantee quality of service over the dirty public internet??????
YA get what ya pay for and VONAGE with all this HORRIBLE press is giving ALL VOIP a black eye for sure!!!! My Packet8/Level3 is 100% clear as a PSTN call all the time 24/7/365
Can VONAGE say that????? NOPE
vonage can not transfer my local phone number from current carrier to vonage as it promissed after almost 4 months of my signing up with it! It still dose not have a clue where is the problem!
I have been paying two bills for this 4 months (current carried – TimeWarner, and vonage) in the meantime.
Can anyone tell me how to get all my money back from vonage that I have paid so far? I heard they are even charge me for disconnect fees, is it a scam or what? Where to file a law suit on this issue?
it’s so hard to make the phone through to their customer servers, and once I did get through, there has been NEVER any status info about it.
Thanks in advance.
Snorty.
I’ve been using P8 for a 6 months and have had to reset the DTA ONCE. Period. That’s it. No dropped calls, excellent voice quality, not a single problem with billing — it’s been a dream.
Did you know that Vonage participates in slamming. They use personal information obtained illegally and cancel your existing phone service in order to get you to switch to theirs. I know because they did this to us. It has cost us a lot of money and time to be without phone service because of their slamming.
Maybe you could report both sides of the story.
Here is Vonage’s response to the last post..
Actually Andy — because we’re not a telecomm carrier (a LEC) we’re simply and end user of telecom services, it is physically IMPOSSIBLE for us to slam, cram or do anything weird with billing/account ownership the way other carriers can. This is because we don’t directly interconnect or share billing inofrmation/systems with other carriers. It’s actually twice as hard for us to even port numbers because we’re not a carrier.
We port numbers through our underlying CLEC partners, they are the only companies legally allowed to do so and if you want to read our LOA for number porting it explains this thoroughly as does our Terms of Service.
Also, one critical difference between us and Primus is that, at least in Canada, Primus is a LEC, not sure about US, but they may be a LEC here too. So it’s inappropriate to lump us both together on this particular issue.
Here is the information that explains, at the top of every LOA, what we do with the number and why we need the LOA and phone bill:
Your previous service provider requires this letter as proof that you have explicitly authorized and requested that your current telephone number be transferred to another service provider. By filling in all fields below and signing and dating this letter, you provide us with the authorization to initiate the process of transferring your telephone number to Vonage’s designated agent. You will then be able to use your
old number with your new Vonage service.
Without an LOA and a current phone bill our carrier partner rejects the port request, plain and simple. So not only do you have one filter in this process (the traditional LEC) you have 2 in our case (our LNP agents and the LEC partner).
Unfortunately, I can’t see the post because I’m not a member of typepad and I don’t have time to fiddle with registering, so it’s hard for me to respond directly to the accusation.
Hopefully this sheds some light on the inner-workings of the telecommunications industry.